Unless you’re a poker player, you may not have heard of Sam Trickett, but he’s Britain’s most successful poker player and he’s opened our eyes to the world of high stakes poker playing where $50m pots are bet, brutal beatings take place and why winning big cash can be boring.

Sam boasts a bank account that most would be envious of and with a record live tournament win of £7.8million, he is one of only 18 people in the world to be successful in high stakes poker playing – but it hasn’t stopped him gasping at the size of some of the stakes he’s seen around the globe.

In Melbourne’s Crown Casino, Sam was gobsmacked by what he saw. Speaking to the Mirror he said: “My friend went in there and he plays huge, huge games. $500,000 a box on blackjack and backgammon. He is playing half a million dollars a box and there are butlers everywhere, people coming in and out and it is just him one-on-one with the dealer.”

He continued: “It’s him on his own against the casino, a bit like a James Bond villain scene. I’m just sat there watching and it is pretty surreal at times, watching that amount of money change hands. But that’s just the sort of things that you see when you are playing in these high stakes rooms.”

He claims that half a million dollars could be doubled or gambled away within a matter of seconds – which is pretty frightening. But Macau is a whole new ball game, where millionaires meet billionaires.

Macau money

Speaking about the gambling antics that he has witnessed in Macau, Trickett said: “I have seen a pot of $20million in Macau. A friend of mine bluffed it all off to a businessman, which is pretty stupid. You probably shouldn’t be bluffing billionaires too often because they’ve got so much money they are going to call. But my friends that I talk about are playing bigger all the time. They are playing like $50million pots if the game gets really big. I used to play in it when it was a smaller game but it has just got too big for me now; it is absolutely massive.”

Despite winning so much, Sam admits that winning can get boring: “If you go on a rollercoaster for the first time it is amazing, but if you go on it 50 times, it is not going to be as fun.”